Edge, the term, is really popular in IIoT/5G space. It's now a continuum of services - Cloud, Fog/Edge, Mist, Dew. I agree that some of it is just marketing jargon but Fog/Edge as a concept is now well understood.
References:
(1) Open Fog Consortium (https://www.openfogconsortium.org/)
(2) Edge Computing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_computing)
I don't know it. So others who might otherwise be interested might not know it as well. So it would be nice to provide a small hint. That should'nt be that hard. As a startup, you cannot afford arrogance, if you want to succeed.
Their devops for autobuilding, testing, and deploying are really awesome as well. We run an internal GitLab host that handles all deployments for us through their CI/CD interface.
What are the DNS servers being used for? The request flow says that the request hits your load balancer (HAProxy) which is updated every 60s using Consul templates.
They also say that DNS records are updated every 60s using Consul templates. But when are the DNS servers used for service discovery if external requests always hit the load balancer (HAProxy)?
I've always been confused about open-source projects that go big on marketing themselves.
Building a good community around open-source projects holds obvious advantages as you'd always need contributors to push the project through its future generations.
As far as I can see, Kivy is supported by a group of independent developers. Kivy (as a group) must have spent money in marketing the product, launching developer contests, publishing books on Kivy (I've seen a couple books on Kivy by O'reilly), and other stuff. I'm just curious to know in what other ways, apart from the need to grow the community around your project, does marketing your open-source project help? And is the money put into marketing the project contributed by the creators themselves?
> Kivy (as a group) must have spent money in marketing the product
I don't think kivy (as a group) does anything except recently the contest, and things like maintaining a g+ account, mailing list, posting on hn or reddit if something intersting happens etc. - were you thinking of anything in particular here?
> launching developer contests
This was funded entirely from sponsorship, you can see the list on the contest page (http://kivy.org/#contest).
> publishing books on Kivy (I've seen a couple books on Kivy by O'reilly)
Publishers commission books because they think they will make money, not because kivy pays them to - actually, I don't think any of the core developer team have been directly involved in kivy books.
> and other stuff
Honestly, not really - I can't think of any other expenses except small things like powering the website server.
> I've always been confused about open-source projects that go big on marketing themselves.
I don't think kivy is really big on marketing itself - if anything, maybe the opposite. I've wondered before if its relatively unknown status (compared to phonegap etc) is at least partly because we don't advertise much, though it may just as well be that more people are interested in html.
Things like the developer contest are great to build interest and get the word out that kivy exists, and as you said yourself have obvious advantages in maintaining and growing the community - if this is 'going big' on marketing, I don't think that term is very meaningful.
I confirm there was no money directly spent on promoting kivy. Most of our communication has been directly with the community, through help on irc/google-groups/SO and other places. We did start to improve communication on twitter/g+/facebook, but it's really on our own time, not paying any agency or specialist of these things.
For books, while we were contacted by a few publishers, none of the core-dev authored any, yet. We tried to give a hand, however, reviewing the books when we could, i personnaly reviewed O'Reilly's book, pointing out a few mistakes to the editor, and gave it a good review, as it was, in my opinion, a well written book with very good exemples and explanations. As it seems usual, i got a free book and a little payment for this (that i didn't expect at all when doing it, my motivation was that there was a need for good kivy books).
And i agree we should do more, if not on marketing, at least on communication (there are a few markets that kivy can fully or partially cover already, we don't want to limit these options, just help it grow where users want to use it), but users need to know about it, and to easily get a good understanding of what's possible to do with it. We have a lot of recurring questions about that, as well as people discovering us and asking why they didn't heard about us sooner.
I do think the community could be way bigger, but we need to adapt the tools we use to communicate, irc works very well up to the hundred of connected users we have, probably less at more, and waste a lot of energy in saying the same things over and over again (although the direct interaction with our users is highly appreciable), SO seems to make reuse of explanations much more common, and is sometime more effective than direct documentation.
Anyway, i'm getting away from the point, will cut it there. :)
What about a Google group? That is, basically a mailing list, but without the mails, for those (such as me) who get too much mail already. Google groups is the best form of community communication out there if you ask me.
... and, maybe a "community" link on the kivy page, to quickly find out how to get in touch with others in the community. Would help a lot I think.
